1. Field of the Invention
The present invention features an isolated Lactobacillus strain and its use for controlling body weight.
2. Description of the Prior Art
With the development of cities, obesity has gradually become the health killer in modern life nowadays. Accumulated studies also indicate obesity increases the risk of developing diabetes, cancers, gall bladder diseases, high blood pressure as well as atherosclerosis, and therefore effectively reducing body fat and decreasing obesity are urgent tasks.
Obesity is usually caused by excess body fat accumulated in the body due to physiological or biochemical functional change(s) and can have adversely affected the health. Lipids commonly include fats, phospholipid and cholesterol. The increase of weight is mainly due to the fact that total energy intake is more than energy expenditure. In general, obesity can be divided into two types including simple obesity and second obesity. Simple obesity can be further classified as idiopathic obesity and acquired obesity and account for nearly 95% of obesity. Idiopathic obesity is caused by huge numbers of adipocytes and is usually found in children obesity. Meanwhile, acquired obesity results from larger adipocytes and is more common in adults with obesity problems. Second obesity is also called symptomatic obesity and is often the result of endocrine or metabolic diseases. Obesity has been found to correlate with certain chronic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, biliary calculus, gout and certain cancers.
Currently, five strategies are available for treating obesity: diet, exercise, behavioral therapy, drug therapy and therapeutic operation. Different treatment or combinations of these treatments are selected for treating patients with obesity based on the risk factors in the patient's health, the rate of weight loss as well as the corresponding effects of those treatments. The rate of weight loss and the effects are determined according to various factors such as age, height, family history and risk factors, etc. The mechanisms of drug therapy include appetite, increase energy consumption, stimulate lipid transfer, reduce triacylglycerol synthesis and inhibition of lipid adsorption. The common drugs used clinically for treatment are phenylpropanolamine (PPA), orlistat/Xenical™, and sibutramine/Reductil™. Nonetheless, treating obesity with natural materials instead of using drugs has become the new trend recently.
Probiotics is beneficial to the health of gastrointestinal tract, and several reports have indicated that in addition to regulating immune functions, these bacteria can also help ameliorate disease symptoms such as high blood pressure, cancers and high cholesterol. Moreover, studies have demonstrated certain probiotic bacteria can regulate the body weight and body fat of obese mice, regardless of the status of these bacteria, live or dead. From prior research, it is speculated that probiotics may contain crucial effective ingredient(s). In prior application, U.S. Pat. No. 8,298,526, the inventor of present invention discovered Lactobacillus reuteri GMNL-263 can effectively improve the symptoms of type I diabetes. However, whether probiotics can efficiently improve obesity symptoms or reduce weight and through which mechanism(s) remain unclear due to the limited literature available up to date.
In previous examination, the examiner mentioned that the result of instant case was inherently achieved by US20120183504 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,298,526 given that the identical composition was administered and would necessarily achieved the same result, given that it was the identical composition.
In the present continuation-in-part, the applicant provided new matters demonstrating the efficiency of lowering weight and fat is better treating with dead bacteria than live bacteria if the dosage is the same. Moreover, according to the examples, the effect can be achieved with the dosage between 5×105 and 2×1010 cells/ml (dead bacteria). Compare to the references, U.S. Pat. No. 8,298,526 discloses the effect of live bacteria 2×1010 cfu/day for improving diabetes, and US20120183504 discloses the effect of bacteria 109 organism/rat/day for improving renal fibrosis (US20120183504 mentions that the bacteria can be treated live or inactive; however, there are no comparison between the effect of live bacteria and live bacteria in the example, and the example only provides the effect of treating live bacteria). After the restriction in the instant case, the claims were restricted to dead bacteria and dosage of bacteria. Neither U.S. Pat. No. 8,298,526 nor US20120183504 disclosed the novel effect of lowering weight and fat by administrating dead bacteria and its dosage as disclosed in the instant case. In addition, in US20120183504 the body weight of rats of normal group did not decrease after administrating bacteria (US20120183504 FIG. 1, 2); on the contrary, in the instant case the body weight of rats of normal group significantly lowered down after administrating dead bacteria (FIG. 2A). This suggests the mechanism and effect are different between the instant case and US20120183504. Therefore, the different result implies that the effect of the instant invention is distinct from US20120183504 and the instant case should be considered as a novel invention that requires laborious experimentation to acquire unexpected results.
In view of the above, one of ordinary skills in the art would not be able to practice the current application by the teachings of the prior art.